Midlife and Aging in Gay America

Proceedings of the SAGE Conference 2000

Douglas Kimmel, Dawn Lundy Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317992608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How is the pre-Stonewall generation aging? What can the Stonewall generation expect?Combining personal experience and original research, this fascinating collection explores the practical and psychological issues of aging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals. Midlife and Aging in Gay America provides highlights from the SAGE 2000 National Conference on the personal, psychological, and economic issues related to growing older as a member of a sexual minority. Midlife and Aging in Gay America delivers reports from a national conference on urgent issues, including:

• health care concerns
• retirement plans
• intergenerational romances
• lifestyle issues
• caregiving
• grief and loss

Special Topics

Gods or Monsters: A Critique of Representations in Film and Literature of Relationships Between Older Gay Men and Younger Men

John R. Yoakam

Summary. This article reviews three films, Death in Venice, Love and Death on Long Island, and Gods and Monsters, and how they depict relationships between older gay men and the younger men to whom they are attracted. The author contends that because of cultural ageism and homophobia, portrayals of intergenerational relationships between older gay men and younger men often stir negative responses. The author also reviews the scant research that exists on intergenerational gay male relationships. He points to three notable authors and one psychologist who were in long-term relationships with younger men as historical precedents. He presents vignettes of five contemporary gay male relationships where there is a twelve to thirty-four year age differences to illustrate the value, importance, and challenges for these men. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

Keywords. Intergenerational relationships, older gay men, younger men, film, literature, ageism, homophobia, long-term relationships

When I was twenty-four years old I traveled to Ireland with my then boyfriend, Allan, who was thirty-six years old. The following Christmas I came out to my family. Although my parents were surprised to learn that I was gay, my sister had suspected. She recalled seeing the photograph of Allan and me near a ruined abbey in Ireland. Our age difference stirred her suspicion; she wondered why I would be traveling with an older man. What was the nature of our relationship?

A few years later a friend of mine in his forties was traveling in Hawaii with a boyfriend who was about fifteen years younger. My friend, Bob, commented that he and his boyfriend were treated well by the Hawaiians. However, the tourists from the mainland pointed their fingers and made negative comments about them. He concluded that the differences in their ages probably alerted them to the fact that they were a gay couple, a relationship that the onlookers disapproved of both for being homosexual as well as intergenerational.

It is my contention that when one sees an intergenerational male relationship it can stir up a powerful mixture of homophobia and ageism in a culture that assumes heterosexuality as the norm and regards intergenerational sexual relationships, be they homosexual or heterosexual, as inappropriate and exploitative.

In such relationships the elder is believed to be love starved and eager to recapture lost youth while the younger is portrayed as exploitative of the older partner’s wealth and status. I have selected three films that illustrate this hypothesis: Death in Venice (1971), Love and Death on Long Island (1996), and Gods and Monsters (1998). All three films depict middle-aged or older men who have an erotic attraction for younger men, whose sexual orientations are either unknown or assumed to be heterosexual.

To be fair, Hollywood does not offer many films where heterosexual intergenerational relationships are portrayed positively either. For example, Sunset Boulevard (1950) portrays the faded silent film star, Norma Desmond, who has trapped a screenwriter, Joe Gillis, into an economically dependent relationship. She shoots him when he attempts to leave her. Harold and Maude (1970) playfully depicts a confused young man about to be drafted into the military who develops a friendship with a mischievous old woman. In the end, Maude commits suicide by taking pills on her 80th birthday, a plan she presumably hatched prior to meeting the young Harold. Just as in gay- and lesbian-themed films, characters involved in intergenerational relationship in heterosexual films often come to a tragic end.

I viewed Death in Venice in 1971, the first year I was exploring the gay world. The film, by Luchino Visconti, is based on the novella, Tod in Venedig, by Thomas Mann. It is brilliantly shot on location in Venice and set at the turn of the twentieth century. The main character, Aschenbach, a German writer in the book and composer in the film, has traveled to Venice for a rest cure. When he arrives at his hotel, he notices a fourteen-year-old Polish lad named Tadzio, who is on holiday with his family. Aschenbach is so enamored of Tadzio that he can’t keep his eyes off of him. He stares at him at the beach. He follows Tadzio and his family on their sojourns into the city and to church. As the story progresses, the beach hotel where Aschenbach is staying slowly empties out. Warnings are posted about infection control. Aschenbach receives a tip that cholera is moving from the east up the Mediterranean to Venice, which will soon be quarantined. In a moment of despair Aschenbach goes to a barber who persuades the aging composer to dye his hair. The barber also daubs the composer’s face with powder, rubs his cheeks with rouge, and colors his lips with lipstick. Aschenbach returns to the beach to look at Tadzio once more before the lad and his family return to Poland. Aschenbach catches one last endlessly enduring glance at Tadzio, who points out to the sea. Aschenbach rises from his chair, suddenly collapses, suffers a heart attack, and dies, without ever consummating so much as a conversation or a physical touch with the young man.

Stuart Byron, who reviewed the film for the Village Voice in July of 1971, reacted to other reviewers who complained of the film’s reducing Mann’s novel to “mere homosexuality.” Byron believed that the greatness of Mann’s story, however, lay in its ambivalence … about ideas of sensuality which go beyond physical sex. Yet, in the film Aschenbach succumbs to the barber’s direction to transform him into a seemingly more attractive physical object in order to appear more youthful to Tadzio. The dye from Aschenbach’s hair runs down his distraught, powdered face as he stares longingly at the beautiful Tadzio for the final time before death. Byron concluded that Death in Venice was unquestionably “the finest movie on gay oppression and liberation to date.” Given that there were few films depicting gay men prior to 1971, there was obviously not much of a field within which to compare this film.

In 1996, after fifteen years and many films depicting gay and lesbian themes, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski, made Love and Death on Long Island. This story involves an aging British writer, Giles De’Ath. Giles becomes smitten with a young American actor, Ronnie Bostock, when he accidentally sees Bostock in a film Hot Pants College II at a multiplex cinema where he had hoped to see A Passage to India, which is based on the novel by the gay author, E. M. Forster. At this time in his career, De’Ath’s reputation as an author is somewhat shaky. His agent encourages him to take a vacation. After researching Bostock’s life and career, primarily from teen-oriented magazines, De’Ath travels to Long Island to find Bostock. There he engineers a meeting with Bostock’s girlfriend, Audrey, by ramming into her shopping cart in a supermarket. Through Audrey, De’Ath meets Bostock, befriends him, and heaps praises on Bostock’s lackluster talent. Towards the end of the film De’Ath proposes to devote his life to Bostock’s career and confesses his love for him. Bostock departs abruptly and rejects De’Ath’s offer and affections. After Bostock receives a very long letter via fax from the aging writer, he does, however, incorporate Shakespeare into his films as De’Ath had wished.

Reviewer Patricia Kowal praised Love and Death on Long Island as a “rich blend of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita.” She wrote:

While both Humbert Humbert and Giles De’Ath find themselves driven down the ladder of social strata by lust, one is tragically destroyed by it, the other miraculously resurrected … Giles is sparked back to life through this “insane” crush … [an] infatuation with someone that he might otherwise revile. Ultimately the film is a bittersweet exploration of the power of love, even unrequited love, as well as the power of the cinema to shape our fantasies and or expectations.

Nonetheless the film tends to reinforce beliefs that relationships between older men and a younger men are neither desirable sexually nor appropriate socially. At least Giles doesn’t die at the end of the film, like Aschenbach or the principal lesbian or gay characters of such films from the 1960s or 1970s as The Fox, The Children’s Hour, and Dog Day Afternoon. De’Ath is portrayed in the film as a silly anachronism of his time. He doesn’t own a computer or a VCR at the beginning of the film. He pursues his obsession with Bostock through awkward gestures. When he finally reveals his love to Bostock, he is flatly rejected. Ronnie returns to his girlfriend. Giles goes to the beach and stares at the sea, pondering his life and misfortune. But he doesn’t die.

Gods and Monsters, released in 1998, is a film loosely based on a novel by Christopher Brahm, about James Whale, the creator of the original Frankenstein movies. In this film, Whale is portrayed as a fading film director, whose career was ruined by a homosexual scandal. His mind is deteriorating after a series of strokes. Nevertheless he still has a penchant for young men. He insists that a young film student who comes to interview him, remove an article of clothing, as Whale’s compensation for answering each question. Whale, subsequently, becomes smitten with his new groundskeeper, Clayton Boone, a reject from the Marines during the Korean War. Whale invites Clayton to pose for him while he sketches. At first Whale denies being homosexual, but then reveals the truth about his sexual orientation in erotic details to Clayton, who becomes annoyed with Whales suggestive “locker room” talk. Clayton doesn’t reject Whale completely as Ronnie did Giles in Love and Death on Long Island. Towards the end of the film they tussle when Whale in a ghoulish fashion attempts to seduce Boone whom he asks to wear a gas mask from World War I while posing in the nude. After Boone frees himself from the mask he almost strangles Whale. But he pulls back, breaks down and cries. Boone later tucks Whale into bed. That night Whale takes his own life and is found dead floating in his swimming pool not unlike the young writer, Joe Gillis, who is shot by the aging actress Norma Desmond at the beginning of the movie Sunset Boulevard. If there is any equality in Hollywood’s handling of intergenerational relationships as represented by these two films, it is that neither homosexual nor heterosexual intergenerational relationships can be consummated sexually and must ultimately be punished in death.

Theater and film critic Jan Stuart wrote the following in a review of Gods and Monsters in the October 27, 1998 issue of The Advocate:

Unrequited gay-straight May-September Yank-Brit love stories would appear to be this year’s flavor, but Condon’s fictionalized bio [in his film Gods and Monsters] is head and shoulders above Love and Death on Long Island as a subtle psychological study of the mutual dependency of two unlikely soul mates. Poetic spirits from rough-and-tumble backgrounds, Whale and Boone share an instinctive empathy for the other’s solitude, which is expressed with increasing tenderness and ferocity as the director’s condition deteriorates.

Lest we assume that Boone’s sexuality might have in some way been influenced by the tenderness of his relationship with Whale, the audience is assured at the end of the film that Boone has safely been tucked into a life of heterosexual marriage and family. At the end of the film we see Boone, after watching one of Whale’s movies on television with his son, showing him an original sketch of a Frankenstein monster.

Review of the Literature on Intergenerational Gay Male Relationships

In searching for research articles or historical models for intergenerational relationships between older gay men and younger men, I discovered that such relationships are almost entirely framed in terms of adult-child relationships (pedophilia) or adult-adolescent-relationships (ephebophilia). The 1991 anthology, Male Intergenerational Intimacy (Sandfort, Brongersma & van Naerseen) is devoted entirely to man-boy relationships, from historical, socio-psychological, and legal perspectives. In this volume, Gerald P. Jones, wrote that the research on intergenerational intimacy, social as well as sexual was frequently labeled “child sexual abuse,” which he claimed fostered a “one-sided, simplistic picture of intergenerational intimacy.” Jones pointed out that a close look at such studies revealed two flaws: the studies nearly always maintained a narrow focus on sexual contact, and proceeded from the assumption that sexual contact in intergenerational relationships by definition constituted abuse. Jones commented that little distinction was made in such research about relationships between adults and children and relationships between adults and adolescents, even those of a consenting age, roughly between sixteen and eighteen years of age in the United States. Research which refuted the prevailing belief that adult-minor relationships (sometimes even suggesting that such consensual relationships might even be beneficial to the young persons involved) was often ignored or suppressed.

I contend that framing all intergenerational relationships as abuse or as an imbalance of power colors perceptions about and limits interest in researching such relationships even when the partners are consenting adults of different ages.

In searching through all of the volumes of the Journal of Homosexuality, from 1977 to the present, I found only one pertinent research article: “Decision-Making and Age Differences Among Gay Male Couples,” by Joseph Harry. When Harry (1983) asked the 1,556 respondents to his questionnaire what the preferred age of their partners was, most said they preferred men of their own age, except for the youngest group (under 25) and the oldest group (over 39), although even their preferences rarely reached beyond 10 years of their own age. Harry’s research also indicated that when older men are partnered with younger men, older men made decisions more often than their younger partners. However, Harry was quick to point out that “difference in age is not sufficient to ensure an inegalitarian relationshi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• KEYNOTE SPEECHES
• RESEARCH
• SPECIAL TOPICS
• Index